Category: C#

When working in a microservice architecture it can be hard to verify the whole system end to end due to all the moving parts involved. Often the purported solution to this is to write integration tests which verify a couple bits of the system at the same time with the test mocked out. If all these subsections of the system pass their respective integration tests we can be confident in the system, right? The Problem with Integration Tests Integration tests are a good way of verifying our system as they use real (not mocked out) components but quite a lot…

Recently I was updating the UI tests in a project now Selenium Webdriver plays nice with .NET Core. And came across a strange error: View the code on Gist. What made this a strange error is it is a failure to communicate with the Webdriver Server, not my underlying application and because of this failure in communication Webdriver could not manipulate my website. The Fix After some googling, this turns out to be a straightforward fix – my project uses the Chromedriver server as it’s Webdriver for tests and simply the Chromedriver server executable I had locally was out of date when…

While I was migrating an ASP.NET Core 1 project to version 2 my authentication code stopped working. After some investigation I kept running across this info message in my application logs which seemed unusual: View the code on Gist. The Fix Turns out this is a simple issue to fix. Just make sure that in the Configure() method in the Startup class contains a call to app.UseAuthentication() before the call to app.UseMvc() for example: View the code on Gist. With this method updated to include the Authentication middleware, the issue should be resolved.

XUnit is a free open source unit testing tool for .NET written by the original inventor of NUnit v2 which is great to work with and supports .NET Core, however, how it handles clean up is slightly different to other test frameworks you may have used. What is a TearDown Method? If you haven’t done much-automated testing before then you may not know what a TearDown method is. Typically its the method responsible for cleaning up after your test(s) have run. For example, an integration test might create data which is persisted to a database. Afterwards, this needs to be purged of data…

ASP.NET Core RC2 – DNX is dead. Introducing the DotNet CLI Until RC2 of ASP.NET Core, the responsibility for building a project was handled by DNX which has now been retired. This has been replaced by the .NET CLI. Part of the motivation for this is to have one tool fulfilling the roles of DNX, DNU and DNVM to try to make things less confusing for developers when they set up their environments. Ignoring a Folder in .NET CLI Compilation One of the quirks during the transition to the .NET CLI from DNX was my project failed to compile. This was due to a node package that didn’t support .NET…

Entity Framework Core Default Behaviour on Delete Cascade delete saves a developer time by not needing to write boilerplate code for related data when the parent data in the relationship has been deleted. However in Entity Framework Core it is not the default behaviour. It takes a more conservative view and sets the on delete behaviour to restrict (StackOverflow Question where EF Core Team Member Confirms) which the documentation defines as: Restrict: The delete operation is not applied to dependent entities. The dependent entities remain unchanged. – EF Core Documentation Compared with the definition of cascade: Cascade: Dependent entities are also deleted. – EF Core Documentation Enabling Cascade Delete Using The Fluent…

For small applications such as prototypes and small side projects, SQLite is a great choice for a relational database. It is really easy to setup because: Its self-contained Its just one database file in your project. No server Because its just one database file in your project which holds all your data there is no extra server setup. No configuration All you need is to create your schema and the database is ready to store data. Letting Entity Framework Core Manage Your Database Schema For all its ease to setup, you still need a schema to define your tables and the relationships between them. Unless…

Visual Studio Code is a great new multi-platform code editor from Microsoft currently in beta. It is a lot more lightweight than Visual Studio. But when writing code I in VS Code I missed the Ctrl-Shift-B shortcut. It makes sense that VS Code doesn’t have it – after all, it doesn’t know what is being written and the build targets, and you can always build without it in .NET Core using dnu build but it can be added back in. Visual Studio Code Tasks Turns out you can integrate your own tasks into VS Code – when combined with Gulp it becomes easy…

With my new job at New Orbit I am moving towards full stack web development in ASP.NET and AngularJS. The first issue I encountered was how to make a GET request to an external API. WebClient vs HttpWebRequest vs HttpClient. Which one?! It doesn’t help that are multiple options. Such as the WebClient, HttpWebRequest and HttpClient classes which all can be used to make a GET request – so which one to choose? Diogo Nunes has a nice discussion of the differences. After speaking with one of the Principle developers here it seemed HttpClient was the best option. Compared to WebClient it is closer…